If globalization offered employment opportunities—albeit in often-wretched conditions—to some people in the developing countries, it also promoted a worldwide culture of consumerism. That culture placed the accumulation of material goods, many of them of Western origin, above older values of spiritual attainment or social responsibility. Nowhere has this culture of consumerism been more prominent than in China, where the fading of Maoist communism, the country’s massive economic growth, and its new openness to the wider world combined to generate an unabashed materialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A popular slogan suggested that life in modern China required the “eight bigs”: color TV, refrigerator, stereo, camera, motorcycle, a suite of furniture, washing machine, and an electric fan. Source 23.2 illustrates this culture of consumerism as well as one of the “eight bigs” in a poster from the post-Mao era. The poster “After Communism in China” in Chapter 21 provides further illustration of Chinese consumerism.